Thank God for Comets

AOL, the dinosaur of the Internet, has finally succumbed to its own comet.  More than Friendster or AltaVista or MySpace, no one should understand more than AOL that strength in numbers for an Internet business is a falsehood.  People vote with their digital feet and digital feet vote at the speed of light.

A long time ago, there were only a few ways to connect to other people on a large scale with your 300 baud modem.  Two of the largest were CompuServe and AOL.  CompuServe succumbed early, but AOL stayed on.  Which was a shame because AOL was always an insular and unrewarding community while CompuServe had a lot of interesting people on it.

AOL, of course, has pushed the limits of all corporate sense in the meantime.  Two years ago, I moved from my previous house where I lived to 10 years.  Even though I'm pretty tidy, I found myself throwing away AOL CD after AOL CD, finally I went back and rummaged most of them out of the trash bags just to find out how many.  Fifty.  Fifty of them.  Now I know I didn't save every one - but getting fifty unwanted anythings is infuriating.  This means I must have received at least a hundred.

AOL has always been about milking people's lack of knowledge about being on-line.  If you can say anything good about AOL, it is that they served as the primer for Internet usage.  People got on, learned what little was there, and then quickly found better options.

Now AOL wants to scale back its subscription operations and focus on AOL's content and web portal.

I just have one question - why would anyone ever want to go to AOL.com?  I just went there to write some sort of comment and I can't.  It is well designed nothing. 




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